A Gardener's Toil.
by Maenad1
Summary: The thoughts of Samwise, set some time after the War of the Ring.


He skims the document a final time and signs it.

It is the seventh one this morning; there's somewhat more substance to the job of mayor these days than the formality of opening banquets and giving speeches. Times have changed and there is much to do, much to be repaired and rebuilt and refashioned, and everyone must do their bit.

Those were The Good Old Days, he grumbles sometimes, when this job wouldn't take a Hobbit from his garden more than five times a year. Yes, old Will Whitefoot, his predecessor, had the best of it; and his wife, lovely Mistress Rose, knows him too well to have to add that in the 'good old days,' when they all were younger and those who are young now weren't born, Frodo Baggins had not yet gone to the Havens and Sam had still had his beloved Master.

But for all he might grumble, if these papers aren't seen to the new row won't be built and the new field won't be planted, and there'll be hungry Hobbits and cold ones this winter, and that wouldn't do at all, so he bends his curly head and puts his name on it three times: red ink, blue ink, black ink, a green cross in the bottom right hand corner, roll it up and tie it with a purple ribbon. Hobbits are fond of ceremony. Too fond, he sometimes thinks, and this is so tedious as to be ludicrous, when one signature might suffice. There'll be mutinous grumbling from the populace about tradition and custom and The Way Things Should Be Done, he has no doubt, but he also has more than half a mind that this is one of those things that needs "diggin' up and dusting off an' puttin' to rights" as the old Gaffer would once have said, and he files the notion away in his head to put to the Master of Buckland and the Thain of the Tooks when the opportunity arises.

That noted, however, for now it is done and his name glistens back at him in a triplicate of still wet ink, soaked through the rolled up paper and visible, if backwards: Samwise Gardener, Mayor of Hobbiton.

When he became Gardener, he's not altogether certain. Etymology's an odd thing; a gardener he was by trade, but he was born a Gamgee of a long line of Gamgees, shooting out in all directions; he could have sworn he had as many sisters as he had ancestors.

And he'd always been a little odd, right enough, and there were not a few who thought he'd been dropped on his head when he was a baby, being as fond as he was of those foolish tales of things that had never been and were nobody's business if they had and consorting with mad old Mr Baggins, whom hardly anyone remembers now, not as he truly was, anyway, but his father had worked for Mr Bilbo Baggins and his grandfather probably had for Mr Balbo, so it was only natural that he should know them and hear their stories- wondrous stories, full of Elves and dragons and Men and other things he'd never seen- and that he should go and 'do for' Mr Frodo in his time.

Nor had it been dear, kind, wise Mr Frodo's fault that things had gone awry and the Great Story had swept them up and carried them off into parts unknown, and he had seen all he could want of those fine things from the stories, and a great many things he wishes he- and more particularly his Master- had never had to see at all.

Nobody's fault but Sauron's, and the transformation of one happy young Hobbit from a peaceful gardener into a warrior and sometime ringbearer and a personage with responsibilities was the least of the crimes to be laid at his feet.

All that had happened though, and some years ago, and he had a written record of the alteration: Sam Gamgee's name can still be seen carved into the back fence; Samwise Gardener's is on the record in front of him.

Nowadays, they blame his oddities on things other than a bumped skull in childhood: Bag End, his beautiful hobbit hole is purported to be cursed. Mad Baggins had lived there, once, and he had been a magician of sorts who could appear and disappear at will and conjure up bags of gold, and then there had been his heir, who had turned queer too, and gone off to live with the Elves over the sea, and Mayor Gardener, who inherited it from Frodo, though he is esteemed and respected, is certainly anything but ordinary.

And he rather likes it, he admits, to occasionally give them the 'shaking up' that dear Mr Frodo had always insisted they needed. His grammar is markedly improved by perusal of the library, the great histories that those most curious Hobbits, the Bagginses, had collected or written, but he considers the loss of his 'ain't's and dropped 'g's and 'h's a fair exchange for the peppering of Elvish he can now and then confuse his audience with, and the scandalised expressions of his neighbours only heightened his delight on the day when there had been a gleeful pounding on his door, and he had found not only his friends the Master and Thain done up in their mail and tabards and astride ponies, but beside them the comical sight of a sleek stallion, ridden by a slender, fine featured creature and a stocky fellow who clung to his companion as if the beast he rode had malicious designs to throw him off and crush his backbone beneath its hooves, or when the King himself had received them and paid compliments to his wife and daughter.

But his creed and his reasoning are still the same. He has no pretensions: it is for the King and the Elves, and Mr Frodo and Gandalf who have gone away, to aspire to great wisdom and knowledge. Plain Hobbit sense had served him in aiding his Master and it serves him now in ordering the Shire.

It was only with some difficulty that the Thain and Master had convinced him to drop his customary formality and refer to them simply by name.

In the end, the Master had been very firm, and all three had laughed at the irony of ordering someone to assert himself.

"Now look here, Sam lad" he had said. "This won't do. If we're supposed to make a show of negotiating with the Bree folk, we can't have you nodding and 'sir-ing' at every turn. This isn't Gondor- don't bristle, Cousin Took, I didn't say there was anything wrong with Gondor, did I?- so we don't need to bow and intone and all that, but you might remember that you've got as much authority as either of us. You're a 'sir' yourself, you know- why, somewhere, I bet there's someone singing a song about you, right now." 

They did, too: sing songs. Good songs, the sort that made the whole nasty business sound much cleaner and nobler than it had been, when he had been covered in the filth of Mordor and the stench of spider and filled with a murderous intent to strangle that Gollum that had betrayed and harmed his Master; and if they said rather too much of his deeds and too little of the exploits, the trials and triumphs of The Ringbearer than he thought was proper, Mr Frodo hadn't allowed him to say anything at the beginning, and he certainly wouldn't disobey his absent friend now.

So, all that being true, Mr Brandybuck and Mr Took became simply Merry and Pippin, and together they had worked up a tidy profit for the Southfarthing farmers and their pipeweed, though he had noted that while he had made the effort to alter his speech, neither Thane nor Master had refrained from referring to the King as 'Strider' and embarrassing the Bree folk.

There it was, then, and he is Samwise Gardener because it is his duty to be so, though he wouldn't have minded at all being just plain Sam Gamgee with his wife and his children and his hedges to trim for Mr Baggins; he's always done his job, whether it had to do with potatoes or Orcs, papers to sign or grand quests to undertake, and his is not unhappy, not a bit of it, not with his youngest child in his lap or Rosie by his side, or sharing a drink with his friends at the tavern; and if his eyes sometimes stray westward, as those of the Elf who visited him often did, he is to be forgiven, because 'happily ever after' is never unmitigated with sorrow.

But he is a practical Hobbit, an' make no mistake, sir or miss, whatever dialect he may speak in, and his morning's work done and his musings dispensed with, it is time to rise and walk back into the sunshine.

There are flowers that want tending.


End file.
